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Vive la Revolution: A Look at Deus Ex's Unlikely Comeback

Deus Ex: Human Revolution's game director talks about reinventing a classic and the future's obsession with vents and ladders.

"It's always [a set of] complex feelings when you finish a project," said Deus Ex: Human Revolution game director Jean Francois Dugas, speaking to me on the phone last week, as the Internet furiously debated his game's boss encounters.

Games have to ship eventually, even phantoms like Duke Nukem Forever. It doesn't always work out. And like virtually any other game developer, Dugas wanted more time to tweak his game. Human Revolution was a risk. Much was on the line..

To say Dugas and his team of Eidos Montreal were facing tough odds is an understatement.

In terms of open-ended game design, there are few games more cherished than Ion Storm's Deus Ex, a sentiment that's only engrained itself with time. You don't have to look far to see a designer citing Deus Ex as an influence, but the series came to a crashing halt after the disappointing Deus Ex: Invisible War. That Ion Storm imploded certainly didn't help matters, either.

Human Revolution walks a fine line of coaxing nostalgia and establishing its own identity.

Eidos Interactive tried to revive the franchise. Crystal Dynamics was working on a third entry, Deus Ex: Clan Wars, which was eventually released without the Deus Ex narrative hooks as Project: Snowblind. The combat attempted to harness Deus Ex's revered sense of player agency.

For the past four years, Dugas has been working on what was once Deus Ex 3 and became Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a sequel that's actually a prequel. A prequel gave him leeway to play within the Deus Ex universe without having to push forward story implications of Invisible War.

Invisible War was released in late 2003. It's been almost eight years since the last Deus Ex game. Anticipation for the game was all over the place.

The response has been hugely positive. It's probably my favorite game this year, praise I do not give easily, as I'd written the series off after Invisible War. I begrudgingly accepted the idea of a non-Warren Spector lead Deus Ex, but many hours later, I was in love.

"Where I'm the most at peace...often times, people have super high expectations, it's easy to fall short of those expectations," said Dugas. "Globally, it seems like, for the most part, we have met or surprised those expectations. For me, it was a huge relief and I was super happy because we spent a lot of time on that game and we were really dedicated and we put a lot of energy and effort in that, so getting that kind of feedback is really exciting. I'm in a good place in my head right now."

Part of what makes Human Revolution feel so different is how old school it feels. In some respects, it feels like an active rejection of modern, focused tested game design, which often struggles to offer true choices and consequence. If a player isn't having fun every second, is the game doing its job correctly? This has stamped out much of gaming's biggest taking too many risks, streamlining adventures to the point where the term "rollercoaster" probably means "scripted, linear experience."

That's not Deus Ex.

"I always wanted it to lower the level of intimidation as much as possible," he said, "whether it's in the control department or trying to evolve the mechanics and things like that, but I always said that I never wanted to compromise the depth and layers of what the Deus Ex experience was."

Deus Ex was never about amazing combat, but Human Revolution went a long way to making it work.

"It's always been our vision, so with the publisher [Square Enix], early on, that's what we were saying," he continued. "We wanted to respect the intelligence of the players. People are not that stupid, and we need to respect that."

You make choices all the time in Human Revolution, whether it's to clear a room with tranquilizer darts, spamming grenades, sneaking through via augmentations or blazing in with a shotgun in hand. And that's just what's happening in the combat; there's a surprisingly deep conversation system, too. One thing the game doesn't do until the very end, however, is make a judgement call on your actions. Your decisions are simply decisions, they don't inform a morality meter on a status screen.

The team did throw around the idea of having a visible morality meter but it didn't last very long.

"I'm more attracted to choices where it's more about your own ethics, your own morality and your response to that," said Dugas. "The [idea of] clear-cut morality [is something] we threw it out of the window very early on of the development cycle. We just moved forward with what we thought would be more engaging on an experience level, as opposed to a gameplay level."

Saving or not saving the Little Sisters had an emotional punch, as well as a practical one.

By "on a gameplay level," Dugas pointed towards games where players make decisions based on how they influence character progression, weapons and status. In BioShock, for example, players are asked to sacrifice or save the Little Sisters. If you sacrifice them, you gain more points to allocate towards powers than if you chose to save them. When Dugas plays games like this, he tends to make his decisions based on what will benefit him most as a player, not what he would do as a person.

There's a reason these feelings are swirling around. Soon, Dugas will be turning 40-years-old.

"As I get older," he said, "I'm more compelled to more meaningful stuff, than just the purely entertaining stuff."

You know...like ladders. And vents. Or vents and ladders.

Climbing ladders and crawling through vents remains the most common way of getting around--a Deus Ex staple. It's pretty ridiculous. Find a stack of boxes, there's gonna be a vent. Not sure how to scale a building? Look for the friendly, nearby ladder! When I asked Dugas how his team determined the future of mankind would deal with so many vents and ladders, he burst into laughter.

"Good question!" he coughed, as he worked to compose himself.

"One aspect where we kind of didn't have the time to spend more time in thinking it more through were those alternate paths with vents and ladders and stuff like that," he admitted. "It's something that if we were to revisit making that kind of game, it's something that would be different."

He alluded to the frankenstein nature of game development as a stumbling block, where systems and tech are constantly evolving and you suddenly have to make the best out of what you have. Here, ladders and vents helped stitch things together.

When in doubt, climb a ladder. Or climb in a vent. Because nobody thinks that's weird in the future, apparently.

In response to that comment, cue complaints about the game's controversial boss battles. Dugas adopted a very serious tone when I asked about the fan reaction to the inconsistent nature of the boss battles. The one-on-one confrontations shifted the game to a very action-oriented style of gameplay that didn't work for every character type (read: my stealth dude).

The situation flared up even hotter when the Internet discovered Eidos Montreal had not created the boss battles themselves; they were outsourced to another development studio named Grip Entertainment. Our interview was conducted as fans were reacting to the news about Grip, so this was fresh in his mind.

"The last few days we've seen a lot of people flacking the company Grip that worked with us on the boss fights and 'Ohhhh, now we understand why those boss fights aren't on par with the rest of the game, it's because they outsourced it.' The truth is that it has nothing to do with that," said Dugas. "We worked with Grip. and Grip did an excellent job in the confines of what they were asked to do."

Dugas did not excuse the boss fights. Rather, he acknowledged the issue, and said his team realized the problem too late in development to make any sweeping changes. Eidos Montreal had built key plot points into the fights, so ripping them out of the game was out of the question, so the primary objective became to make sure the boss fights weren't frustrating.

If you weren't a combat-heavy character, the game's boss battles were a jarring change.

"At some point, we were wrestling kind of bit with some of the features and the right amount of time and right amount of resources to work on those systems," he said.

The confused reaction is not what surprised Dugas but the outright frustration. Dugas claimed internal playtesting, which he credits improving many aspects of Human Revolution, didn't raise a red flag here.

"With the boss fights, this is the place where there was a disconnect where what we experienced during the playtest and what we experienced with the game being released," he said.

Dugas has chalked the response as a lesson learned.

Where Dugas will apply those lessons is a good question, too, though one we didn't mull over much during our conversation. Not long after Human Revolution shipped, Square Enix's said it's doubling the size of Eidos Montreal, signaling the publisher's happy. Combined with a sneaky epilogue, a sequel is all but assured, even if Dugas is unsurprisingly noncommittal.

Eidos Montreal is also making Thief 4, which finds the studio again resurrecting another beloved but dormant franchise.

"It [was] our goal to revive a Deus Ex experience, and that's what we did," he said.

I had to ask one last question before hanging up, though. As per tradition, Human Revolution offers a variety of options for how the game can end during a critical moment. If given a single option, I wondered which one Dugas would have picked.

"I would go with sinking the place because I don't think it should be one individual who makes the decision for mankind," he said. "But since like in real-life, maybe I wouldn't care or not ballsy enough to sacrifice myself--I would go with either Sarif or Taggart.

"It's always [a set of] complex feelings when you finish a project," said Deus Ex: Human Revolution game director Jean Francois Dugas, speaking to me on the phone last week, as the Internet furiously debated his game's boss encounters.

Games have to ship eventually, even phantoms like Duke Nukem Forever. It doesn't always work out. And like virtually any other game developer, Dugas wanted more time to tweak his game. Human Revolution was a risk. Much was on the line..

To say Dugas and his team of Eidos Montreal were facing tough odds is an understatement.

In terms of open-ended game design, there are few games more cherished than Ion Storm's Deus Ex, a sentiment that's only engrained itself with time. You don't have to look far to see a designer citing Deus Ex as an influence, but the series came to a crashing halt after the disappointing Deus Ex: Invisible War. That Ion Storm imploded certainly didn't help matters, either.

Human Revolution walks a fine line of coaxing nostalgia and establishing its own identity.

Eidos Interactive tried to revive the franchise. Crystal Dynamics was working on a third entry, Deus Ex: Clan Wars, which was eventually released without the Deus Ex narrative hooks as Project: Snowblind. The combat attempted to harness Deus Ex's revered sense of player agency.

For the past four years, Dugas has been working on what was once Deus Ex 3 and became Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a sequel that's actually a prequel. A prequel gave him leeway to play within the Deus Ex universe without having to push forward story implications of Invisible War.

Invisible War was released in late 2003. It's been almost eight years since the last Deus Ex game. Anticipation for the game was all over the place.

The response has been hugely positive. It's probably my favorite game this year, praise I do not give easily, as I'd written the series off after Invisible War. I begrudgingly accepted the idea of a non-Warren Spector lead Deus Ex, but many hours later, I was in love.

"Where I'm the most at peace...often times, people have super high expectations, it's easy to fall short of those expectations," said Dugas. "Globally, it seems like, for the most part, we have met or surprised those expectations. For me, it was a huge relief and I was super happy because we spent a lot of time on that game and we were really dedicated and we put a lot of energy and effort in that, so getting that kind of feedback is really exciting. I'm in a good place in my head right now."

Part of what makes Human Revolution feel so different is how old school it feels. In some respects, it feels like an active rejection of modern, focused tested game design, which often struggles to offer true choices and consequence. If a player isn't having fun every second, is the game doing its job correctly? This has stamped out much of gaming's biggest taking too many risks, streamlining adventures to the point where the term "rollercoaster" probably means "scripted, linear experience."

That's not Deus Ex.

"I always wanted it to lower the level of intimidation as much as possible," he said, "whether it's in the control department or trying to evolve the mechanics and things like that, but I always said that I never wanted to compromise the depth and layers of what the Deus Ex experience was."

Deus Ex was never about amazing combat, but Human Revolution went a long way to making it work.

"It's always been our vision, so with the publisher [Square Enix], early on, that's what we were saying," he continued. "We wanted to respect the intelligence of the players. People are not that stupid, and we need to respect that."

You make choices all the time in Human Revolution, whether it's to clear a room with tranquilizer darts, spamming grenades, sneaking through via augmentations or blazing in with a shotgun in hand. And that's just what's happening in the combat; there's a surprisingly deep conversation system, too. One thing the game doesn't do until the very end, however, is make a judgement call on your actions. Your decisions are simply decisions, they don't inform a morality meter on a status screen.

The team did throw around the idea of having a visible morality meter but it didn't last very long.

"I'm more attracted to choices where it's more about your own ethics, your own morality and your response to that," said Dugas. "The [idea of] clear-cut morality [is something] we threw it out of the window very early on of the development cycle. We just moved forward with what we thought would be more engaging on an experience level, as opposed to a gameplay level."

Saving or not saving the Little Sisters had an emotional punch, as well as a practical one.

By "on a gameplay level," Dugas pointed towards games where players make decisions based on how they influence character progression, weapons and status. In BioShock, for example, players are asked to sacrifice or save the Little Sisters. If you sacrifice them, you gain more points to allocate towards powers than if you chose to save them. When Dugas plays games like this, he tends to make his decisions based on what will benefit him most as a player, not what he would do as a person.

There's a reason these feelings are swirling around. Soon, Dugas will be turning 40-years-old.

"As I get older," he said, "I'm more compelled to more meaningful stuff, than just the purely entertaining stuff."

You know...like ladders. And vents. Or vents and ladders.

Climbing ladders and crawling through vents remains the most common way of getting around--a Deus Ex staple. It's pretty ridiculous. Find a stack of boxes, there's gonna be a vent. Not sure how to scale a building? Look for the friendly, nearby ladder! When I asked Dugas how his team determined the future of mankind would deal with so many vents and ladders, he burst into laughter.

"Good question!" he coughed, as he worked to compose himself.

"One aspect where we kind of didn't have the time to spend more time in thinking it more through were those alternate paths with vents and ladders and stuff like that," he admitted. "It's something that if we were to revisit making that kind of game, it's something that would be different."

He alluded to the frankenstein nature of game development as a stumbling block, where systems and tech are constantly evolving and you suddenly have to make the best out of what you have. Here, ladders and vents helped stitch things together.

When in doubt, climb a ladder. Or climb in a vent. Because nobody thinks that's weird in the future, apparently.

In response to that comment, cue complaints about the game's controversial boss battles. Dugas adopted a very serious tone when I asked about the fan reaction to the inconsistent nature of the boss battles. The one-on-one confrontations shifted the game to a very action-oriented style of gameplay that didn't work for every character type (read: my stealth dude).

The situation flared up even hotter when the Internet discovered Eidos Montreal had not created the boss battles themselves; they were outsourced to another development studio named Grip Entertainment. Our interview was conducted as fans were reacting to the news about Grip, so this was fresh in his mind.

"The last few days we've seen a lot of people flacking the company Grip that worked with us on the boss fights and 'Ohhhh, now we understand why those boss fights aren't on par with the rest of the game, it's because they outsourced it.' The truth is that it has nothing to do with that," said Dugas. "We worked with Grip. and Grip did an excellent job in the confines of what they were asked to do."

Dugas did not excuse the boss fights. Rather, he acknowledged the issue, and said his team realized the problem too late in development to make any sweeping changes. Eidos Montreal had built key plot points into the fights, so ripping them out of the game was out of the question, so the primary objective became to make sure the boss fights weren't frustrating.

If you weren't a combat-heavy character, the game's boss battles were a jarring change.

"At some point, we were wrestling kind of bit with some of the features and the right amount of time and right amount of resources to work on those systems," he said.

The confused reaction is not what surprised Dugas but the outright frustration. Dugas claimed internal playtesting, which he credits improving many aspects of Human Revolution, didn't raise a red flag here.

"With the boss fights, this is the place where there was a disconnect where what we experienced during the playtest and what we experienced with the game being released," he said.

Dugas has chalked the response as a lesson learned.

Where Dugas will apply those lessons is a good question, too, though one we didn't mull over much during our conversation. Not long after Human Revolution shipped, Square Enix's said it's doubling the size of Eidos Montreal, signaling the publisher's happy. Combined with a sneaky epilogue, a sequel is all but assured, even if Dugas is unsurprisingly noncommittal.

Eidos Montreal is also making Thief 4, which finds the studio again resurrecting another beloved but dormant franchise.

"It [was] our goal to revive a Deus Ex experience, and that's what we did," he said.

I had to ask one last question before hanging up, though. As per tradition, Human Revolution offers a variety of options for how the game can end during a critical moment. If given a single option, I wondered which one Dugas would have picked.

"I would go with sinking the place because I don't think it should be one individual who makes the decision for mankind," he said. "But since like in real-life, maybe I wouldn't care or not ballsy enough to sacrifice myself--I would go with either Sarif or Taggart.

I haven't played enough of it to pass judgement on the whole game (lost my save, not feeling much urge to rush back to it and start over), but I found how heavily it leans on you to go stealth to be really off-putting. I felt like I was playing that way because the game obviously wanted me to play that way, rather than because I was choosing to play that way. Given how important player agency was to DX, I found that disappointing.

I was initially very excited by Human Revolution, but during the Picus stuff I lost interest and never bothered to pick it up again.

Inventory management was a real chore, combat was becoming frustrating, and I didn't trust the game to respond to my skill choices fairly. On top of all that, knowing that I would soon reach another tedious boss battle is what ultimately convinced me that I didn't want to play any more of the game.

Also I played a totally stealth/conversation/hacking spec'ed character and I had no trouble with the boss fights. AND I went to the trouble of tranq'ing them all even though it made no difference in the outcome.

Great interview, this game blew me away. It is right up there with Portal 2 as my personal Game of the Year. I want to see a "Assassin's Creed 1 to Assassin's Creed 2" or an "Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 2" level of improvement in the sequel. I really think that the Crystal Engine is holding the team back in the graphics department. I hope they take the time to develop their own engine like CDProjekt RED did for The Witcher 2. Moving away from the Bioware's Aurora Engine that CDProjekt RED used for the first Witcher was a incredibly smart move. Human Revolution was great despite the dated graphics visuals and character animation. I think the art direction really saved the day in terms of keeping me interested visually. I really hope that Thief 4 isn't using the Crystal Engine as well.

@Tennmuerti: Agreed on the boss fights. I didn't even mind them narratively (and I usually really dislike boss fights), and if you actually looked around, there was ammo and weapons and mines all over the place in every boss area, so part of me thinks the complaints about the boss fights was a result of the game not having much else in it worth complaining about. Yeah, the game gives you choice everywhere else, but sometimes Adam really does need to fight someone. I don't get what's wrong with that.

@Tennmuerti: Agreed on the boss fights. I didn't even mind them narratively (and I usually really dislike boss fights), and if you actually looked around, there was ammo and weapons and mines all over the place in every boss area, so part of me thinks the complaints about the boss fights was a result of the game not having much else in it worth complaining about. Yeah, the game gives you choice everywhere else, but sometimes Adam really does need to fight someone. I don't get what's wrong with that.

Agreed and agreed. It's not like they were impossible, they just presented a different type of challenge. There were places a combat character had to hack a door or crawl through a vent. There were places a stealth character had to use combat. I never understood the complaints - the boss battles weren't amazing, but they weren't bad or incongruous either. It's like the complaint took off and people just started jumping on the bandwagon. And it had to really stem from the first boss battle alone. By the second boss it was very easy to be well rounded and have ample typhoon ammo unless you were rushing through (in which case, you were prolly playing a combat character anyway).

The only issue that I had with the boss fights is that they were triggered by me just casually walking into a room and being confronted. I snuck around every single enemy facility without being spotted and it seemed silly for me to just stroll on into those rooms like that. That's minor, though, and I don't consider it a real problem.

As for being forced to fight and not be able to take out the boss from afar or talk them down? I have no problem with that. These are heavily augmented super soldiers. I assume that they can also see through walls, track threats, etc. just like I can so taking them by surprise shouldn't necessarily be an option. It's established in the game that your social augment doesn't work on everyone and it's clear that not everyone can be reasoned with. Sometimes you just have to fight. Even with all of my points in hacking and stealth and none in weapon use or armor I had no trouble with the fights. I used the same strategy for all of the boss battles and it didn't require me to be good at combat.

Part of what makes Human Revolution feel so different is how old school it feels. In some respects, it feels like an active rejection of modern, focused tested game design, which often struggles to offer true choices and consequence. If a player isn't having fun every second, is the game doing its job correctly? This has stamped out much of gaming's biggest taking too many risks, streamlining adventures to the point where the term "rollercoaster" probably means "scripted, linear experience."

Great interview/postmortem on my current favorite release of the year. They deserve all the praise and success they get moving forward, and Dugas seems like a pretty genuine personality.

I have no doubt they'll learn from criticism regarding boss encounters. Just tweaking them so that you actually have some indication of how much damage you're doing and how close to the end you're getting would have greatly reduced any problems I personally had. It wasn't the difficulty so much as the lack of feedback that bothered me (although one boss in particular gave me hell for about an hour). Still, they stand out because there's so little else for me to nitpick. Cannot wait to see where this team takes the series next.

@Jimbo: Indeed. I made a point to play opposite of what the game seemed to "want" me to play, and I'm not having nearly as much fun as most it seems. I like the game fine, but playing a gun-toting maniac apparently wasn't playtested much. Which, as you said, is really disappointing in a game that's all about player agency.

In the future everyone is in a perpetual state of having just moved into thier homes, so this accounts for the endless sea of empty cardboard boxes found in Deus EX. Seriously though, I really enjoyed the game. Deus EX: HR has an amazing, engaging story and memorable characters, and that's what I love to see in games. It's the same reason I love franchises like Mass Effect and Uncharted. My only real dissapointment was that there seemed to be parts in the game where they had to take shorcuts because they didn't have the budget or time to fully realize some of their ideas. So, I'm glad to learn the studio is going to nearly duble in size, my anticipation for the sequel is through the roof.

The game had a dissapointing over-all story arch - started out great, with the possibilty to expand alot on the whole augemntations/pure-thing and relate them to the real world, but instead it went down the fantasy-drain and got lost in some conspiracy-thing I didn't really like at all.

My problem with the bossbattles wasn't really that they were bad, because I don't think they were even for my hacker-Jensen, what they lacked was a feeling of point. I didn't knew who the bosses were and I didn't care, so they just became useless.

Big fan of these articles/interviews and I'm also glad to see him say that boss battles weren't THAT hard. I just created a thread on this, but almost all the bosses had an "alternate" route to beating them besides pumping them full of lead.

Good article. There is something rather positive to approach a game now past it's introduction point, and not be set within the bracketing of whether it was deserving as originally reviewed and such. That has been a trend lately, and not one I felt was 100 percent objective for such after the fact. This rather was a different post analysis and skipped that noise, valued the product while noting some the askance points. the hope is that they will be ameliorated in a sequel!

I really didn't care for the story of Deus Ex. There are points that certainly are more interesting than others, but I felt there wasn't a personal-enough level to it. It just felt like... things happening, " okay go here, and then go here, and then go here and fight this guy..." That said, the passive storytelling and the world they created is fantastic. Regardless, great read. I really loved this game, despite its unfortunately problems. If they DO make a DE4, the certainly have earned my enthusiasm for it.

I have to say that I wasn't expecting much from this game, in fact I wasn't even going to get it. But the fact that @patrickklepek liked it, and that alone, compelled me to buy it.

What a game, I fell like I was playing the original again. With the exception of the boss battles. I walked into the first battle with NO weapons or augs that were for combat. When I say no weapons, I mean I didn't even have a stungun. I had to load a save from almost an hour previous and find a gun. Not cool.

Spoiler: The only boss battle I though fit was with the guy near the end in the room full of "Bodies: the exhibit" stuff. Yea, I was dumb and went to a limb clinic...

If you consider one man unable to make a decision for all of mankind -- then the Darrow ending is the one to pick , since it actually sends out the truth to the masses. By blowing up the structure, you are suppressing the truth and you give free reign to the powers that be to spin the entire thing.

The suicide ending is just kind of dumb.

I had pretty big issues with the game's story(mostly its paper-thin characters), but the gameplay was rock solid. Its been a while since I had a good stealth experience. Am looking forward to playing future games from this dev team.